utilitarianism and indigenous peoples

'...utilitarianism's almost indiscriminate endorsement of the imperatives of industrial development..or its endorsement in practice of the usage of indigenous or nomadic peoples who are denied their title to the use of lands on which their life depends. Implicitly or explicitly it has been endlessly involved in the eviction or resettlement of peasants or others who have been judged to stand in the way of economic progress.'

---David Wiggins.

There's no doubting that utilitarianism has been a, if not the, central element of our public philosophy and much of what stands for political philosophy. I think that much is clear. But what, exactly, is utilitarianism and why has it been so disastrous-if Wiggins is to be believed?

U can be factored down into a number of components:

1) 'consequentialism': the rightness of an action/policy/institution is to be judged in terms of outcomes, the resultant state of the world that follows from them. The 'good' precedes the 'right'. And what is good, is some independently thought of good. So, let's not talk of intrinsic worth because everything must be subsumed under the telos of 'the good'. This is one way in which distinct moral thoughts are denied a place. At best, they are instrumentally important (without us ever suspecting that may cease to be moral if viewed in this way)

2) welfarism: what type of consequences, though? Well, their impact on utility. But what is that?, you ask. The crude version has it that utility is happiness or pleasure (and doesn't even bother wondering whether these two things are distinct or, indeed, if we can think of there being only one type of pleasure). The modern version (used by economists since Lionel Robbins) has been to say that it is desire-satisfaction. Utility, then, is not a substantive notion, but merely a mapping of our preferences, a numerical representation of the satisfaction of our preferences. If we prefer x over y and we actually get x rather than y then, logically speaking, we should get more utility from x than from y.

But note:
a) We are not saying anything about the nature of those desires (what they are, how they were formed, etc.)

b) and the aim is not to maximize our utility (that would commit us to the mistake of thinking utility is a 'thing' (pleasure, happiness). Our aim is simply to satisfy our preferences and the word 'utility' is putting a number on it.

3. 'addition': Once we agree to consequentalism and welfarism we're left with the other plank in the construction, namely: how do we add up the individual utilities of everyone in society. There can be different ways. U suggests we maximize the sum. Simple.

Hang on. We're also actually assuming that each person is concerned about the 'general happiness' of everyone (what, even at the expense of their own happiness/interests?). There's some confusion here. But putting that to one side, the particular way in which aggregate, go from the individual to the social is, of course, problematic. And that's what Wiggins is getting at. If the sum is increased at the 'expense' of violating people's rights then so what? does that or should that even count in our final assessment (assuming that we even have a notion of rights which in the case of nomadic and indigenous peoples was evidently not the case..you can't say that a black person was 2/5 ths of a human being or that the 'Red Man' doesn't count at all!)

And it's remarkable that that type of crude 'thinking' is so prevalent at the level of popular culture and so-called informed discussions. Take a simple example: should 'we' (and we always have to question what is meant by 'we') go to war or not? Should we make more bombs or not ? Well, the utilitarian might say, if we don't someone else will, so we might as well. Or, more commonly, it creates jobs, makes some people better off. i.e on the whole it makes people better off than if we didn't. There is no question here of ethical constraints. We do not question the 'evaluative space' (welfarism) or the way in which people are taken into consideration ('addition'). Evidently, an important part of their lives is not. Those bombs will be dropped on some people, one presumes. This is, to repeat, not an empirical question, as in: are the losses to these people greater than the gains to the others. It's about not making such a calculation in the first place. As Sen says, evaluation is not calculation.